Ward found out the hard way that writing memoir is a very different experience from creating fiction, and that it is something she’ll never attempt again. Memoirists and novelists alike will find something of value in Ward’s thoughts on her latest work.

“I wanted to smoke in a left Bank café,” Miller says. “I wanted to be sophisticated and daring, nothing like my nice-Jewish-girl self and her nice Jewish parents from whom I longed to escape.” What she found in Paris, however, was a deeper connection to her parents – and a sense that liberté may lie elsewhere.